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I don't you should think like that at all! Those all require different ways of using your brain than The Witness. In fact, the only thing "warming up" your brain for The Witness is other puzzles in The Witness.
You've mentioned on Twitter that you have fun making games, but that art/asset creation is taxing for you. But it's not like you will get better at the art part of game making by doing more game design and coding, even though they're related.
It kinda sounds like you're thinking in the outdated form of having one "IQ" that tells you that your brain is smart at exactly this level, no matter the task. It's okay to be better at some things than others.

On the subject of Rich-2-Rich hidden marketing: I love picking up and leafing through the absolutely real, ostensibly non-ironically-named Monocle Magazine. If you ever want to know which hotel bar is the hottest in Dubai, hit me up.
I had the same thought. Also, it sounds hard to do in a computer RPG, but I've wanted to do something like this in a D&D campaign for a while.

I've probably asked this question before in this very thread, but: Why are Americans so afraid of unions? A lot of the work "luxuries" we enjoy here in Scandinavia like long holidays, proper parental leave and mandated overtime pay are things the unions here have fought hard to get through.
But every time I hear Americans talking about unions it's in this weird hushed tone, like they're afraid of someone hearing them suggest it. Like Austin Walker talking about working conditions in the games industry on the Beastcast: "Now, I'm not saying they should UNIONIZE, but..." But what? Why not? I literally don't understand.
In the specific case of overtime: I also have a salaried contract where overtime doesn't kick in until X amount of hours more than regular has been worked. But! It works both ways. So if I have to leave a couple of hours early because I have a personal errand, no big deal, I still get my regular pay. And crucially, I have a working environment where this is normal and even encouraged. I wont get a stare-down from my boss or a lecture about showing proper investment in the work just because I need to pick up my sister at the train station.

Disclaimer #1: I'm more or less exactly like Patrick, in that Mario 64 was one of the defining games of my childhood, so I can't keep a "critical distance".
Disclaimer #2: I'm writing this after 6 beers and an Opeth concert.
I see what you're saying, but I feel like you're being way too harsh. Yeah, Mario 64 has a lot of rookie 3D mistakes, like making the worlds way too big compared to your size/speed, but almost no one else had made them before. But I don't think the designs and concepts were as bad as you make them out to be.
For example, a lot of the worlds have a kind of natural end point, despite being open ended. In the first world, you can do whatever you want, but your eyes are immediately drawn to the mountain top, and you think "I want to go there". Think about this almost 2 decades later, when first- and third-person games still have trouble getting their players to actually look up.
In a way, a lot of the levels are the answer to "how do we turn a 2D game into a 3D game", and deciding to wrap the levels around a zenith or nadir. But in some of them you start down, some you start up, some are linear, some are mazes and some are very open.
Another thing is that the levels do have a cohesion, just not always in the visual theme. There's three distinct tiers of levels. The starter set, the basement set, and the top floor set. In the starter set the paintings are all on the ground floor, and the levels are all ground-focused, or rather single-planed. In contrast, the basement levels are much "lower". The progression is usually dependent on going down, or you have to be careful not to go further down, because death awaits (infinite pit, lava, quicksand, etc.). And the top floor set are very vertical, like the rainbow level, the level where you change size, the mushroom platform level, or even the water level (has you changing the water... level in order to get to the top).
Together with the podcast (see my first post), this has come full circle back to 2008.

I love that Danielle is gone for one week and already the cast is back to: -Chris messing around with a weird music game. -Riffing on random non-sensical syllables. -Discussing the obscure project of a 90s PC game star designer. -Nick Breckon playing a hardcore war game. -Puns. -Jake playing an old Nintendo game instead of anything new. -Far Cry 2. -Super Mario Sunshine is under appreciated. [edit]-And now Wizard baboo, holy shit.
[edit2]-I can't believe I missed the Goku shirt.

Oh, I never saw this.
Surprisingly not! Where I am from is where the gulf stream ends up, so it stays warmer than it should. It "only" gets to around -20C/-4F in deep winter. And even then it doesn't get the biting cold of still air that you will if you go some kilometers inland from there. Winter does last from around october to april, though.
Additionally, I'm now living in Oslo. Which looking at this map, is around the same distance north-south as mainland Canada.

I had to stop the podcast at the "customized birthday/Captain zoom" segment, because I recently discovered that someone has made "[name] is a smoking hot babe" with 500 different names and put them all on Spotify.
They're all exactly 1 minute long, there's 100 to an album, and each album cover is just a shitty flash photo of some girl. The band is, of course, called the Smoking Hot Babe Lovers.

I finished listening, this was a really fun episode. I vote to promote Gabe to official Podcast Cop and keep arresting them when they skip segments or say something factually wrong.
Also, I have been scared of the Anno games, but Nick describing them as filling the same hole as Settlers II made me really want to try them out.